The Happy Prince and Other Tales
A golden statue and a swallow help the poor of a city by giving away the statue's jewels and gold leaf, and both are changed by the arrangement. Wilde wrote five tales for children and read them to his own sons, and the stories are closer to Andersen than to the Victorian moral tale.
The prose is simple and the endings are not happy in the conventional sense. Wilde's interest is in sacrifice and in the difference between being admired and being useful. The collection is short enough to read in one sitting, and it is one of the few Victorian children's books that adults return to.
Public-domain status
First published in 1888. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Oscar Wilde died in 1900, so this work has been free to republish there since 1971.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 902 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll, 1865
- The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling, 1894
- Seven Little Australians — Ethel Turner, 1894
- Peter and Wendy — J. M. Barrie, 1911
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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